It's going to be impossible to get through this article without mentioning the C-word, so let's just get it out of the way now: chillwave, chillwave, chillwave. Yes, Toro Y Moi, AKA South Carolina native Chaz Bundick, is the quintessential chillwave artiste. When Chaz's blissed-out nuggets of naive, tropical-tinged nostalgia began appearing on hip music blogs in the summer of 2009, they triggered an online avalanche of similarly sun-damaged lo-fi pop. The tongue-in-cheek term chillwave was coined to make the trend easy to identify, and easier to dismiss.

You'd have thought that Chaz would recoil at the mere mention of the word, but he's remarkably sanguine. "I don't take it negatively," he says, his humble, easygoing nature radiating down the phone line from the Palmetto State. "I'm all for being in a genre, it helps people relate to your music."

Chaz can say this in the confidence that his debut album, last year's Causers Of This, represented the apogee of chillwave, a gorgeously muggy tribute to lost loves and distant teenage summers. He's also accelerated away from the chillwave pack by readying a thoroughly distinctive follow-up.

Whereas Causers Of This was smeared with samples and cheap synths, newie Underneath The Pine is constructed in the old-fashioned way, with real instruments. The sticky 80s pop and R&B collages have been replaced by fuzzy, autumnal psychedelia and moody soundtrack grooves.

"I had to re-train myself," Chaz admits. "With electronic programs, you're recording and writing at the same time; you make a beat, you record it, it's there. With this album, I didn't want computers to take over my style."

Chaz always had the intention of making a "sample-free" second album, compiling mixtapes from thrift store LPs as a source of inspiration and enlightenment. The artists who seemed to connect were old disco or funk bands, cosmic jazzers such as Sun Ra and Lonnie Liston Smith, and especially Piero Umiliani, the prolific Italian composer responsible for soundtracking soft-focus exploitation caper Orgasmo and the Muppets classic Mah Nà Mah Nà.

"I feel like film composers are the best songwriters," says Chaz, "because they know how to convey emotion and feeling just by changing a couple of chords."

'I'd get to the point where I was working so intensely I forgot to eat. I'd sleep for six hours and then get up and start again'

Toro Y Moi

Duly inspired, Chaz began to lay down songs at a remarkably rapid rate. "I'd get to the point where I was working so intensely I forgot to eat," he says. "I'd sleep for six hours and then get up and start working again before I'd even brushed my teeth. The song Before I'm Done is about how I'm always worried that I'm not going to get all my ideas out of my head before I die."

Chaz paints his upbringing as typically suburban, although not too many typical suburban dads would have played their kids Suicidal Tendencies records and driven them across the state to Weezer gigs. Although he spent his college years trying and failing to get into the music industry as the frontman for an indie rock band, Chaz became Toro Y Moi when he was 15 and started recording his songs into a four-track tape recorder. The name, by the way, is deliberately nonsensical.

When Chaz's break came it was in a highly modern fashion; he was picked up on by the blog site No Pain In Pop: "I tried my hardest to follow the handbook with my old band, but to just send off an MP3 in an email and end up where I am now is completely shocking."

Even after he signed to Washington DC's Carpark Records, Chaz didn't fully take on board the idea that lots of people were going to hear the very personal music he was making in his bedroom, including his ex-girlfriend: "She was mad that she had to find out how I was feeling about things from the record. It was sort of an asshole move." Suffice to say, he hasn't made the same mistake with Underneath The Pine. The album instead projects a more general feeling of melancholy and ennui, prompted by the fact that all Chaz's friends have now fled his home town while he's back in his old teenage bedroom.

"I used to have my own place but since I was on tour so much I decided to move back and save some money," he says. "It was very much still how it was when I was at school … I took a bunch of stuff off the walls … a Cat Power poster, nothing too embarrassing."

Chaz seems relaxed about being home. His mum keeps him buoyant by providing him with healthy brainfood. "I had a really good sandwich last night, it was tofu and chutney," he says cheerfully. "Even when I'm on tour, all I can think about is getting back home so I can record again."